AWG gives Senate Inquiry the facts about Australian playwriting

6 November, 2015

The Australian Writers’ Guild homed in on the importance of funding Australian stories, the lack of a national Cultural Policy and the effect on playwrights of recent funding cuts, in their briefing of the Senate Committee looking into federal government funding of the arts.The committee, chaired by Senator Glen Lazarus, has been conducting public hearings around Australia examining how the 2014 and 2015 federal budgets would affect the arts sector, focusing largely on cuts to the Australia Council and the shifting of funds to a new National Programme for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA) proposed by then Arts Minister Senator George Brandis.The hearing on Thursday 5 November took place in Sydney and was the opportunity for the AWG and other sector organisations to give evidence, speak to their submissions and answer questions by the committee, whose members also included Senators Jacinta Collins and Catryna Bilyk (Lab), Scott Ludlum (Greens) and Ian Mcdonald (Lib).Also on the panel with AWG Executive Director Jacqueline Elaine were Jane McCredie (NSW Writers’ Centre), Angelo Loukakis and Anne Nicholson (Australian Society of Authors) and - by teleconference - Sam Twyford-Moore, Convenor of the Open Book Council.Ms Elaine’s opening remarks stressed the importance of understanding playwriting as an art form and the role playwrights play in contributing to Australia’s cultural cannon.Asked by Senator Lazarus what was required to take a writer forward, she said excellence is not born, it is nurtured and developed. To that end, it was important to see one’s work on stage and often the first opportunity for playwrights to develop and perfect their craft was with the small to medium and regional theatres.Ms Elaine pointed out that the NPEA funded new works but not individual artists and she asked who was to write these new works if individuals were precluded from applying.In the current climate, she added, AWG made a decision not to take any organisational funding from the Australia Council and instead to apply only for funds that would directly benefit its playwright members in getting their work commissioned and produced. In a practical sense that meant that the Guild would have to sacrifice its own operations to ensure their members would continue to have opportunities to develop.Senator Ludlum asked what the AWG would like to see happen.Ms Elaine said that would depend on the nature of the problem and the sector hasn’t yet been told what the problem is with the Australian Council that necessitated the redirection of funding to the NPEA.“None of us have been told what the problem we are trying to solve is. Is the problem funding, and if so why don’t we have a cross-government look at where to find the funds? We might look at the $50M just announced by the Foreign Minister and Arts Minister to produce Thor and Alien films in Australia, which is essentially industry development. This is supposed to be about cultural policy not industry development. We would like to see a cohesive cultural policy.“We haven’t been told that Australia Council is not doing the job for the sector. In fact, our research shows 80% of playwrights surveyed agree that a single cohesive funding organisation works well. A good start would be a clearly articulated cultural policy.”Ms Elaine added that the Guild has not always been a strident supporter of the Australia Council: “We’re an organisation that has made formal complaints about the Council to the Ombudsman. That is an effective existing mechanism to resolve issues and we are satisfied with the response from the Australia Council to our complaints – they have proven to be responsive and adaptive. So before we try to figure out how to fix it, we should first determine what the actual problem is.”